H. G. Wells Read online

  Patrick Parrinder

  Introduction

  (New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the details of the plot explicit.)

  THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON?

  For The First Men in the Moon, a book deep-structured with irony and satire, not even the title is innocent. As readers we have to double-take from the first moment – surely that ‘in’ should be ‘on’? A brief search online shows how many people, even those flogging merchandise based on the novel, still ‘correct’ the title to the more intuitive, and wrong, ‘The First Men on the Moon’.

  With that counterintuitive preposition ‘in’, Wells propagates the sense that there is something really new about his story, however many people may have been on the moon before. What makes this so cheeky is that his was far from the first book to propose men voyaging to the interior of the moon, as even his own characters point out. ‘Kepler, with his subvolvani, was right after all,’ says Cavor, the scientist whose invention transports him and the narrator Bedford (who almost certainly has no idea what his companion is talking about). As long ago as 1634, the astronomer Johannes Kepler had posited, in his posthumous Somnium (dream), a human visitor to the ‘subvolvani’ – the moon-dwellers – who live in caves.

  Before Wells, nineteenth-century writers had revived this notion of troglodytic moon-dwellers. It is impossible to say whether Wells was familiar with these particular works, but there is no doubt that he was conscious of the tradition of lunar literature (a tradition invaluably examined in Marjorie Hope Nicolson's 1949 book Voyages to the Moon).

  A chronology of moon-voyage stories stretches back nearly two thousand years, to the second century AD, when Lucian of Samosata's facetiously entitled True Story got his hero to the moon by waterspout. But it was in the seventeenth century, as astronomy changed lunar speculation to lunar observation, that works set on earth's now-observable neighbour began to proliferate. This was when Kepler dreamed, and other dreams followed.

  For the next two hundred years, these stories were of course informed by their predecessor texts, and by the science of their times. Even a playful farce like Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687) explicitly refers to Lucian and other early moon stories, features Kepler himself as a lunar emissary, and is predicated on cutting-edge inductive astronomy. ‘Wonders!’ Behn's Scaramouche says at sight of the moon-dwellers. ‘[H]aste to the old Gallery, whence, with the help of your Telescope, you may discover all.’

  With the advances of the nineteenth century, though, it was these very telescopes that showed the moon's airless, waterless state, and denuded it of imagined inhabitants. While there were works depicting this lifeless moonrock, some writers ignored the proven barrenness. But whether they populated the moon of their imaginings or not, with the burgeoning of early modern science the nineteenth-century writers were increasingly concerned with methodology, with the specifics of how a lunar journey might be effected. History of a Voyage to the Moon (1864), for example, by the pseudonymous ‘Chrysostom Trueman’, is of interest less for its unimaginative extraterrestrials than for the ‘repellante’, the anti-gravity substance that propels its spacecraft.

  In fact, gravophobic materia, that appealing bit of scientific nonsense that Wells appropriates, was used by several writers in the nineteenth century. This even led one, Eric Cromie, author of A Plunge into Space (1880), to engage in a brief spat with Wells over the similarities of their spherical, gravity-repelling spacecraft. Wells dismissed the charge with brevity and scorn, saying: ‘I have never heard of Mr Cromie nor of the book he attempts to advertise by insinuations of plagiarism on my part.’1 Whether or not Wells knew Cromie's work, though, it is clear that the particularities of Wells's moon voyage were not new. The hollow moon, its low gravity (which features as far back as Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638)), even the propulsion and shape of his craft, had all been used before.

  The question of tradition, of course, is not merely one of the story's furniture, but of the social, satirical resonances for which the setting is used. Wells triangulates between, on the one hand, the nineteenth-century moon stories with their more-or-less scientific treatment of astronomy, geography and transportation, and, on the other, an earlier tradition that used the moon as a setting for societies utopian, dystopian, satirical, comedic or polemical to make points about our own.

  SCIENCE, FICTION AND SCIENCE FICTION

  Extraterrestrial contes philosophiques (philosophical tales) were not by any means all moon-bound (arguably the locus classicus of the genre, Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), features travellers from Sirius and Saturn), but plenty were. The later focus on putatively scientific vehicles and journeys had rendered this tradition somewhat less fashionable, but Wells's genius was to invigorate it – The First Men in the Moon is satire, in which the lunar setting is ground for social speculation and investigation, or it is nothing – while staying true to the rationalist spirit of late-1800s science fiction. It was perhaps this tendency to temper the scientific with the philosophic and narrative that set Wells so apart from that other giant of the genre, to whom he is often compared, Jules Verne.

  Verne and Wells are generally considered the founding fathers of science fiction, but their differences are more marked than their similarities. Very distinct methods and philosophies are clear in the ways Wells and Verne told their moon stories. Born forty years before Wells and not so directly touched by fin-de-siècle angst, of a more secure middle-class social background, Verne tends to write with a simpler moral compass. Though by no means so crassly bourgeois in outlook that he is incapable of conceptualizing social or philosophical conflict (his extraordinary character Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), an Indian prince and self-made exile from the iniquities of British rule, proves that), Verne's ultimately conservative/optimistic view of the march of history can lead him to a plodding focus on supposedly ‘real’ science.

  For Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865), the rigorous ‘scientific rationality’ of his extrapolations is key, as in the extended – and dull – technical descriptions. For Wells, it was the adventures on the moon itself that were important. The science perhaps had to be plausible, but was subordinated to that narrative end.

  This exercised Verne. ‘He invents’ the Frenchman announced disapprovingly about Wells. ‘I make use of physics…. I go to the moon in a cannonball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars [sic] in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça c'est très jolie, but show me this metal. Let him produce it.’2

  Verne is quite right, though literarily purblind. Wells is not so concerned with the close examination and representation of engineering and physics, because for him it was more important as a writer to create something très jolie – after all, that dismissed ‘prettiness’ is affect, satire and vision. Wells himself claimed that, with the exception of the anti-gravity metal Cavorite, there is no impossibility in the book, but one senses in that special pleading; not that it is necessarily untrue, but that it was not the point. Wells even seems to teasingly remind Verne that what they both create is not science: when Bedford vaguely remembers ‘Jules Verne's apparatus in A Trip to the Moon’, he is not understood, because ‘Cavor was not a reader of fiction’.

  Wells had a tendency to posit one big impossibility, which he would argue with specious pseudo-scientific (an adjective he dismissed as ‘imbecile’) seriousness, and then to get on with the job of telling stories, and more. Defending himself against Verne, he argued that through his method had emerged something ‘one might regard as a new system of ideas – “thought”’.3 Not only narrative, but – to quote a popular definition of science fiction – the literature of ideas.

  In comparison to the sometimes lumpen ‘realism’ of Verne, Wells developed a theory of how the writer of ‘scientific romances’ should not subordinate his or her imaginings to the actually possible. ‘For the writer of fantastic stories to help
the reader to play the game properly, he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis. He must trick him into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds.’4 Verne clearly could not domesticate Cavorite, and the fault was his. Had Wells obeyed Verne's strictures about the possible, not only would we have no First Men, we would likely have no Invisible Man, no Time Machine, and we would be incomparably poorer.

  Wells's theory of plausible, rather than narrowly possible, extrapolation is what makes him such a seminal figure of science fiction. Science fiction is not, whatever its advocates may sometimes claim, ‘about’ science any more than it is ‘about’ the future. It is, like any worthwhile literature, ‘about’ now, using a technique of rationalized (rather than free-for-all) alienation from the everyday to structure its narratives and investigate the world. Science and futurology are invaluable modes for it to do this, but if they become the end, rather than the means, the result is often pedestrian fiction that, ironically, is far more likely to date. Verne's moon-journey science is wrong: so is Wells's. But nobody cares when reading the Wells, because that is not what the book is for. Wells knew that what would later be called science fiction requires not informed belief, but a trusting suspension-of-disbelief – an integration of plausibility and narrative, as well as, at its best, a sense of the marvellous.

  In breaking the straitjacket of ‘real’ science to write First Men as science fiction, Wells has the aesthetic space to develop functions of the genre that are harder for Verne. One is the freedom to enjoy the weird of his creations. Most of the hitherto-imagined inhabitants of the moon were broadly human, perhaps a little shrunk or differently dressed. By contrast Wells envisaged a dominant race of vastly various insectoid shapes, all described with gusto and precision, and a succulent ecosystem of alien plants, fat behemoth mooncalves (Wells's literalizing of ‘mooncalf’, the antique term for a misshapen, freakish thing, is a lovely touch), and hydra-like coiling monstrosities of the sea (prefiguring those two idiot-savant poets of the tentacular, H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson).

  The sheer vividness bespeaks not only extraordinary invention, but Wells's revelling in that invention. The literature of the fantastic is a sprawling field, which encompasses generic science fiction, fantasy and horror, as well as utopian/dystopian speculations and philosophical ruminations by writers not associated with genre at all: a key divider between these various fuzzy sets is their relationship to the fantastic they all use. The unabashed indulgence of the unreal of science fiction, so clear in Wells's gusto, distinguishes the fluency and facility of the best of the genre and its antecedents from the ‘fabulations’ sometimes attempted by those constrained by higher brows. When ‘mainstream’ writers dip their toes into the fantastic, they often do so with the anxiety of seriousness, keen to stress that their inventions are really ‘about’ other, meaningful things (this can lead to the rather stilted, arch fairy-tale register of some second- and third-generation ‘magic realism’, for example).

  By contrast, those firmly within the fantastic tradition know that the unreal will always be read metaphorically – what is the human mind but an engine to metaphorize and process metaphors intended and found? – but that there is also pleasure in its literalism. In Swift, for example, Gulliver's journey to Brobdingnag (a major influence on Cavor's discussions with the Grand Lunar) clearly casts a remorseless light on Swift's own society; it also, however, features a sword fight with a giant wasp, a passage the enjoyment of which depends on the specific uncanny/estranging impact of literalizing the impossible: simply, it is a great, weird idea. Weirdness is good to think with, and is also its own end.

  For his part, Wells does not so carefully delineate the insectan morphology of the Selenites only for the purposes of satire, but because – as in his other books his Martians, his vivisected beast-men, his Morlocks show – Wells the biologist was, like many excellent science-fiction writers, a grotesquophile. The pleasure he took in his oddities, his unpretentious relationship to (serial) fiction, his unerring sense of the importance of the pace of an adventure story combine to make The First Men in the Moon something one could call proto-pulp, which prefigures the verve of the (occasionally viscerally histrionic) literature later associated with pulp journals such as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unsurpassed pulp poetry of Chapter 17's title: ‘The Fight in the Cave of the Moon Butchers’.

  The surrender to the weird can be part of what is sometimes called science fiction's ‘sense of wonder’. This abused and controversial, but not entirely useless, term expresses, however elusively, a groping for the numinous that is characteristic of the field, and makes even some otherwise pedestrian science fiction an heir to visionary traditions. In First Men the numinous is found in the very corporeal weird itself.

  Its first intrusion is the lunar dawn, with its uncanny ‘landslip in the thawing air’, and irruption of fabulous life. Bedford and Cavor are suddenly prelapsarian, in a garden so fantastic even Bedford's wizened soul is moved to lush description of ‘bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their growing’. ‘It was like a miracle,’ Bedford uncharacteristically observes, and demands that we ‘Imagine it! Imagine that dawn!’ How can we not, when it has been so vividly and beautifully rendered? This is the oneiric and mystical in the literal fantastic: a numinous of the weird that Verne could never achieve.

  The other, more fully developed moment of mysticism occurs when the execrable Bedford, having abandoned his companion, travels back through space alone towards the earth. As the title to Chapter 20, ‘Mr Bedford in Infinite Space’, makes clear, the vision is here an effect of Bedford's loneliness in eternity. For modern science fiction to locate its wonder in ‘the vastness of space’ or some other overdetermined pornography of the infinite would be at best gauche. However, Wells predates such cliché: and, what is more, this is a polemical enlightenment.

  Some commentators have unconvincingly described Bedford as a ‘lovable rogue’. In fact, he is bereft of redeeming qualities, and in the clichéd distinction such laughter as he provokes is entirely at, not with, him. Wells writes Bedford without any of the humanity or sympathy with which he depicts other ‘middling sorts’, even sometimes risible or pathetic figures such as Mr Polly. Wells underlines his critique of Bedford with this, the character's one moment of perspicacity.

  Bedford is a miserable, unwilling Bodhisattva. ‘I looked down on Bedford as a trivial incidental thing…. I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses.’ The use of ‘ass’ ensures that the comedy is not lost, but this is a true and bitter realization for our protagonist. After a long epistemological battle, Bedford is able to some extent to anchor himself back in crassness by reading ‘convincingly realistic’ advertisements from his magazine; he eschews knowledge of self, chooses to define himself instead through the comfort of banal and two-bit commerce. ‘I regret that something of that period of lucidity still hangs about me,’ he says: his abiding sadness is not what he is, but that he knows what he is.

  Here, there is no awkward negotiation between the science fiction and the satire – it is the one that allows the other. Bedford's lonely illumination is a link that joins Wells's numinous, itself adjoined to his science-fictional grotesquerie, to his social satire and critique. Human society is not left looking very good in the cold light of the moon.

  CAPITALISM, IMPERIALISM AND GOLD

  Both First Men and Verne's From the Earth to the Moon are texts that make satirical and polemical points, but it is telling how differently the two writers' strategies allow them to develop this social comment. In Verne's novel, the Gun Club of Baltimore – an absurd gathering of gung-ho war amputees and the maimed – lament the onset of peace, hoping for the ‘joyous incident’ of battle. The satire is crucial to the story: it is, though, heavy-handed, and not entirely comfortable. Verne's ‘realism’ means that his gunshot astrona
uts cannot land on the moon itself, but can only circle it and catch tantalizing glances before returning to earth. There is, then, no comparative setting to defamiliarize and make strange our everyday, so Verne's satirical points can only be made by pantomime exaggeration.

  By contrast (and despite Wells's later claims that the seed of the story was Cavorite, with the moon and Selenites later additions), in First Men the characters seem always to have been going to walk on the moon's surface, precisely because our own world can be counterposed to what is found there. The social commentary, though not always subtle, is effected by comparison, rather than Verne's exaggeration. The moon as a setting, for Wells, is foil to earth's follies, though it is swiftly clear that Wells is too sophisticated a writer to fall into the simplicities of ‘moon good, earth bad’. First Men is a satire and a comedy that is in places broad, but it is a complex and troubled one.

  Wells was a socialist, of a peculiar, elitist kind, and unsurprisingly capitalism and imperialism are the novel's particular targets. Bedford is a money-grubbing vulgarian, not so much a representative of ‘big capital’ as of the venal petty bourgeoisie, constantly and crassly on the make, unconcerned by any considerations other than the narrowly financial, and possessing an (almost) unshakeable self-righteousness. When first we meet him he is bankrupt, but still convinced of his business acumen, and is fleeing a creditor whose entirely reasonable desire to regain his or her money Bedford recasts as ‘malignant’. He is writing a play not out of any artistic desire, but merely because it beats being a clerk.